


Planets aline

by schmetterling92



Category: Call the Midwife
Genre: F/F, One Shot Collection, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-24 21:46:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22024954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schmetterling92/pseuds/schmetterling92
Summary: Delia will later say, “how funny that we ever met at all and that you are you and I am I and we are us together”. And Patsy will respond, “yes, how very odd”.
Relationships: Delia Busby & Patsy Mount, Delia Busby/Patsy Mount
Comments: 5
Kudos: 39





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing.

——

The first time they kiss, Patsy has had too much Whiskey and Delia too little. Patsy runs out of the room. The next morning she pretends nothing has happened at all and carries on as before except for the tea she brings Delia with a hopeful and scared look on her face and too much milk and sugar. They don’t talk about it for weeks.

——

Delia knew about the nightmares since the day she moved in. Paper thin walls are a curse but luckily Patsy’s room only shares one wall with another room and it is Delia’s.

— —

Delia first sees her scars by accident. She walks into Patsy’s room without knocking as has become her habit. Patsy’s back is fully exposed when she opens the door and Patsy hisses at her to mind her manners. Delia closes the door and goes back to her room.

A few hours later Patsy knocks on her door, slips into her bed and they lay there with the unspoken question hanging in the room. But Delia doesn’t pry because she is Delia and Delia doesn’t pry. Patsy moves positions so she can hold Delia and smoke at the same time. After lighting her second cigarette she begins, “I was born in the Far East in 1933…”

Sharing her story is an apology and a plea all at once. Forgive me, believe me, hold me, love me. And Delia’s silence begs, trust me, trust me, trust me.

— —

Patsy is aloof and cold. She looks just as posh as she speaks. Delia is the country bumpkin, so smart, so nice, so totally in love with a world which will never accept her. Suffice to say they don’t make friends easily.

— —

Patsy arrives at training with nearly nothing. Delia arrives with boxes and boxes of books. You would almost think the roles are reversed, that Delia was from the educated upper class family and Patsy from the poor country folk.

— —

They only end up with rooms next to each other because Delia arrives late. Patsy will later, for the first time, thank god, the universe, whomever for this. For once the planets aline in her favour. For once fortune favours her.

——

Delia will later say, “how funny that we ever met at all and that you are you and I am I and we are us together”. And Patsy will respond, “yes, how very odd”.


	2. The beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They observe each other for weeks; they hear each other sleeping at night. The flash of red hair, the yellow dress, the cigarettes, the smell of lavender soap.

\-- --

Patsy's favorite colour is green; Delia's yellow.

\-- --

Patsy and Delia met in training. This much is true of the lie Delia has constructed for her mother.

Patsy comes directly from boarding school but is already 19 and older than all the other girls. She had to make up for lost schooling during the war is the explaination she gives. The other girls think it is due to the Blitz in London. Only Delia will ever know the truth.

\-- --

Delia is 16 when she starts training. She is so, so young and so wide-eyed and joyful, fascinated by London, the big city, the bright lights and by nursing, by all the new things. Patsy, so used to supressing her feelings both good and bad, can only observe this wonder in her eyes from a far. She doesn't dare get any closer.

Patsy thinks she is so much older than Delia in so many ways. She's a year ahead of Delia in training and has lost any naivety towards nursing and hospitals. She thinks that this makes her more mature.

\-- --

Delia isn't naive; she's just a much a child of the war. Her childhood, though definitely not as drastically as Patsy's, did not go untouched. An empty pantry, neighbors, relatives, and friends gone to never return were also a part of her country upbringing. She has decided that all of that doesn't matter anymore.

\-- --

Delia is more mature, more thoughtful. She doesn't supress her feelings and does not kid herself. But she will politely hide her hurt, her frustration if it means making the other person feel safe. She is empthatic and rarely forgets to think of others for thinking of herself. Delia does not hide who she is for fear of someone finding out. Except she hasn't really found out herself yet.

\-- --

Patsy supresses her feelings until she implodes.

\-- --

Delia, for all the positive qualities Patsy secretly attributes to her, cannot make any friends. She is too much and not enough. Too young, too eager, too smart, too Welsh. Not posh enough, not polished enough. They are alike in their inability to make friends. Delia sits in the corner at meals and reads while eating, pretending, also to herself, that she is sutdying hard and showing her mam that it was right to come here. She yearns for someone to sit with her, even if in silence.

Patsy is surrounded by others and alone. She is the upper class, boarding school girl the others strive to be. If only they knew.

\-- --

Patsy can hide behind her accent. Delia's accent betrays her everytime.

\-- --

They observe each other for weeks; they hear each other sleeping at night. The flash of red hair, the yellow dress, the cigarettes, the smell of lavender soap.

\-- --

One day, Patsy sits down next to Delia at breakfast. Delia doesn't look up from her textbook and tea. Patsy says nothing and stares at her toast. Their friendship begins like this: quietly on a Tuesday at 8 o'clock. 

\-- --

This becomes their rountine: Delia sits down in the corner and opens her book. Patsy comes a few minutes later and sits down next to her. They says nothing and just enjoy knowing someone else is there who feels just as alone as they do.

\-- --

Patsy makes the first move but Delia says the first words, "My name is Delia in case you were wondering who hears you snoring". Patsy doesn't snore but she appreciates Delia admitting that she knows about the nightmares without making a big deal out of it or asking any questions. "My name is Patsy and you don't need to be pretending to read the same book for the last four weeks while I am sitting next to you". Delia blushes and looks away and Patsy knows at once that she has spoken a private truth. She had forgotten that others have them too and curses herself for being so tactless. Delia has the better manners, who knows when to say nothing.

\-- --

The ice being broken, they start to talk over toast and tea, mince pies, the rare nurse's home dessert. At first, their conversations centre around training. Patsy fills Delia in on the inner workings of the hospital and Delia, always the over-achiever, helps Patsy understand the new material despite being a year under her. Slowly, they begin to talk about things outside the nursing realm. The weather, the latest news. Delia sees Patsy soften, sees flickers of light behind her dark exterior. Patsy sees flashes of a Delia who is not always upbeat, who is just as frustrated and sad as her at times.

\-- --

One day, between coffee and porridge, Delia mules over what she should do over Christmas break, not sure if she can afford time off from studies. Suddenly, as if thinking she is being impolite by talking so much about herself, she asks Patsy what her plans are over break. Patsy begins to formulate an answer but panics, noticing that the little Welsh woman has so quickly and quietly broken down her walls, and abruptly leaves the breakfast table without a word.

\-- --

Patsy avoids Delia over the next few days and doesn't attend meals at their standard time. She passes her in the hall one day and Delia smiles widely at her, so ready to forgive her actions that Patsy is overwhelmed by her kindness and understanding. She flees past her under the pretence of being very busy.

\-- --

In the evening, she knocks on Delia's door. Her apology, while superficial and without any explaination for her actions, is all the same sincere and Delia willingly accepts it and by next morning's breakfast, it is as if nothing ever happened at all. Except of of course that it has. Their conversations become more personal, Patsy willingly giving in.

\-- --

Meals become study sessions, become walks on the Thames, become evenings at the pictures, become night caps in Patsy's room, become the drunken kiss.

\-- --

The kiss was a beginning and an end. The end to their platonic friendship, to pretending, to wondering why childhood friendships always felt one-sided and to what falling in love feels like. It is the beginning of discovering who they really are. It is the beginning of the uncertainity, to never feeling safe, to always looking around. To feeling dirty, to asking for forgiveness, for being disgusted with oneself and wishing all these feelings would just go away and that the right man would just be waiting around the corner.

But it is also the beginning of something so wonderful and whole and so precious that Patsy feels she must put it into her cardboard box under her bed so that when it is over, since it must end somehow, she can think back to this moment and know who she really is. It is the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega.

\-- ---

After the kiss, they return to their silent beginning, only now the silence pretains to just one thing. They still talk and have outings together. They pretend like nothing has happened at all until one evening while sitting on a bench after a walk, Patsy places her hand next to her side and when Delia does the same with hers, Patsy opens her hand, places her palm upwards. An offering, an admission, a new beginning. Delia grabs Patsy's hand almost agressively as if to say, "you fool for letting me wait this long". But the look on her face is peaceful. Patsy smiles.

\-- --


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As long as they are careful, Delia thinks, it can stay this way forever and maybe that is enough.

\-- --

Delia has lived through Patsy's multitude of hair colours, red to blonde to auburn to orange to ginger back to blonde then back to red. So when she starts to remember after the accident, she thinks she has known and been with so many women. But that doesn't feel right, doesn't fit the person she is starting to remember she was. For awhile she can't remember Patsy's name, has only the whisp of redhair to go by. Something in her tells her not to mention it to her mam just yet. It feels too private anyways, like a thin ribbon tucked under her pillow.

It is not completely false that she knew many women, since there has always been more than one Patsy and she has witnessed most of them. Though this she knows: Patsy is a redhead.

\-- --

At the beginning, it doesn't bother them that much to hide their relationship. It is adventurous and exciting. They are in a way afforded more chances to be together than other couples in the nurses' home, since Matron always stands at the ready to bar any man from entering. They see eachother almost every day and have a multitude of good excuses for why they spend so much time together: they are studying for the next exam or practicing for ward placements. And the others don't really like them enough to care anyways.

As long as they are careful, Delia thinks, it can stay this way forever and maybe that is enough.

\-- --

When they knock down the nurses' home at the London, Delia is still recovering from her accident far away in Wales and their future, though tinged with hope, is still wholly uncertain. Patsy rides past the demolition site the day after it is knocked down, all the memories of their relationship - their first kiss, long talks and longing, holding eachother against the storm - lying there in the rubble.

Patsy allows herself a rare moment of self-indulgence. She kicks the gravel with the toe of her shoes, with all the agression and anger at how unfair the world is. But before her tears threaten to smear her make-up, she pushes her bicycle forward and thinks, all of this doesn't matter anymore.

\-- --

Their relationship begins in silence when Patsy offers Delia her hand and Delia takes it. Their relationship is silence, for all the things that cannot be said.

\-- --

Delia drinks her tea with loads of milk; Patsy her coffee black.

\-- --

The second kiss also happens under the influence of alcohol. Delia had come back from visiting her family over the Christmas holidays and under the pretence of not wanting to miss too much time studying, had arrived before New Year's bareing alcohol and leftovers from Christmas dinner. She hadn't pressed further as to what Patsy had been doing while she was gone. 

Patsy suggests they open the whiskey Delia's father has given her to which Delia makes a cheeky joke about starting the New Year's celebrations on the 29th.

Patsy is a happy drunk, which Delia thinks suits her just perfectly. The liquid courage allows her to be vunerable enough to show her happiness, to be silly, to feel what she feels for Delia. She twirls Delia around and around to music only she can hear, and Delia, who is actually more of a sad drunk, is infected by her laughter. The only other sounds are the drip of a water faucet and the whir of cars on the street below.

And just like that the moment is gone and Delia is sobbing. About feeling dirty, about hiding, about hating herself and hating Patsy for loving her, for showing her what that was like. When those words had left her mouth she cannot bare it anymore and runs to the washroom. Patsy holds her hair away from her face as she empties the contents of stomach. After everything is out, Patsy kisses her forehead. There is nothing left to say.

\-- --

The next morning, Delia lies to Matron by saying she must have picked up the stomach flu her little cousins had over Christmas. Patsy drinks her tee silently in the common area a few metres away.

\-- --

Delia remembers Patsy visiting her in the hospital after the accident. She remembers the look on Patsy's face when she cannot remember her and the feelings of shame and disappoinment and frustration for not being able to think of her name. Even then something inside her told her that this fact was important, that this person must be remembered.

She remembers everything about the accident, from saying good-bye to Patsy to the moment the truck hit her. Falling, falling, falling and then landing on a hospital bed in the London. The bed baths, her mother and father keeping vigil. It all came back in a dream. She woke drenched in sweat and so very far away from London.

She cannot bring herself to tell Patsy for a very long time. Patsy thought this pain was hers alone, a private memory for her to supress.

\-- --

They never talk about the 29th. Sober Delia is actually the more daring of them both, calling Patsy Pats and grasping her hand while giggling at one of her joke's at breakfast. It is her way of dealing with her shame, by pretending she has none at all, a tactic Patsy knows all too well. Patsy keeps this part of Delia under her bed in the cardboard box along with all the others, and reminds herself of it when she sees Delia pushing her nails into her arms during lecture or biting the top of her pencil while studying.

\-- --

It's the same part of Delia which shows no emotion when the others talk approvingly of the treatments for homosexual men, when the newspaper headlines report of yet another arrest, when she is asked to dance and cannot refuse for their sake, when matron tells them to not have any dark secrets, when her mam writes to ask her about any gentlemen friends, when the sermon in their mandatory church services covers both the sacrement of marriage and the sin of sodomy.

\-- --

Sometimes Patsy dreams of taking Delia away with her, of escaping everything here and becoming someone else, of living another life. But then the tiniest moment of light will come: sweet ice cream on the boardwalk, Delia smiling at the first flowers of spring, a job well done on the ward, listening to a new record with Delia until curfew. And Patsy will know, this is where she should be, that she would live through every painful thing again just to have these moments. 

\-- --


	4. Chapter 4

\-- --

They will always have Paris.

\-- --

Patsy started smoking at boarding school, tobacco being one of the more popular forbidden substances in the dormitories. Technically her first cigarette was in the camp, but she doesn't count that one.

\-- --

Delia doesn't smoke until the sun peaks through the dirty window of her nurses' home room, the light shining on Patsy's hair, the now blonde strains sparkling in the first rays of sunshine. She takes one of Patsy cigarettes and lights it, slowly breathing in the smoke and letting in calm her down in a peaceful buzz. This becomes her habit. When Patsy stays overnight in her room, or she in Patsy's (because wherever Patsy is, there are also cigarettes), she smokes just one, before Patsy has woken.  
Patsy knows of course, smells the smoke as she wakes.

\-- --

Later, while visiting them in Scotland, Trixie will realize that Delia didn't replace her as Patsy's best friend but rather that she had in a way replaced Delia for a while, or at least provided a substitute, while Patsy was too unsure to introduce Delia or to make up an excuse for what she was doing with her time off.  
She wonders if Delia was ever jealous of her like she was of Patsy and Tom dancing together, which now seems even sillier in light of the truth. 

\-- --

Delia is quite guarded herself she's just better at giving people just enough that they think she's telling them all.

\-- --

So this is how it ends. Their omega, a bicycle accident.

\-- --

"No, I'm a friend" a friend, a friend that is all they will ever be to each other.

\-- --

Patsy has to get on her bicycle, the bicycle, two days after the accident. Fred had repaired it and there were no more excuses to not ride it. As if nothing has happened at all. Nothing did happen anyway, Patsy thinks. A work friend had an accident and doesn’t even remember her. A part of her thinks, it would have been easier if Delia had died. How she is now, there but mostly not (oh how Delia had wished not to be this), breaks her. If she had died, she could bury her and move on. Now it felt like Delia was an optical illusion. On the outside she was still there, but inside everything was missing. Patsy grasps at every memory she has of them. If she forgets now, no one will know that they ever existed, the “we” that Delia and Patsy were. It will be as if nothing ever happened at all.

\-- --

In the end it is the nicknames that give them away, Patsy is sure of it. The decision to leave the nursing home had many reasons: they were too close, there were already rumors circulating. Patsy knew she could never be seen there again as soon as she left. Patsy's cover of wanting to leave male surgical was convenient since it wasn't completely a lie. In the end, they just weren't careful enough. Delia hates herself for it. She was always a bit more willing to take risks and now it was her fault that it was ending this way.

\-- --

When Patsy came to Nonnutus she was happy, surrounded by loving, truly nice people. But she also felt guilty. Guilty for leaving Delia in the nurses' home with no one she was really friends with, on male surgical with handsy doctors and rude patients. Delia suggests that they don't see each other for a while and Patsy agrees. She is not yet ready to introduce Delia to her new friends anyways, afraid of circumstances repeating themselves. They cannot be seen in the Nurse's home with each other without the rumors spreading again and so long as Delia is living in the nurses' home Patsy doesn't want her life to be any more difficult than it has to be.  
Patsy thinks, this is the first time Delia is breaking, the first time the light is really going out of her eyes.

\-- --

Of all the things Delia hopes for from Patsy, the words "I love you" are not one of them. She knows Patsy loves her, she just says it in other ways. "I love you" is "join me at cubs", is "yes Delia we can eat chips again", is smiling at her from across the table, is brushing her hand while passing the sugar, is coming to her when she is said but it is never "I love you" spoken to her. So when Patsy says it before getting in Fred's car, Delia can barely keep the tears from running because she knows Patsy must be terrified she will lose her and that she must say these words now.

\-- --

Delia almost wishes Patsy hadn't said those words. It makes the good-bye all the more difficult.

\-- --

While Patsy shows Delia the contents of the cardboard box under her bed one by one, Delia realizes, that if anything were ever to happen to her that she would land in this box too, and that maybe she already has.

\-- --


End file.
